Introduction: The Life He Told, and the Life the Letters Tell

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.”

— Proverbs 21:2, KJV

C. S. Lewis disliked writing about himself. He disliked being asked about himself, and he was suspicious of the modern habit of reading an author’s books as clues to his private life. He thought that a poem or a story should be looked at, not through. It is an irony he would have enjoyed, or perhaps resented, that he has become one of the most written-about Christians of the twentieth century. There are dozens of biographies, several films, plays and novels, a stream of scholarly studies, and an industry of quotations, some genuine and many not. Anyone who tries to tell his life now has to make his way through a great deal of material, and through a few well-worn legends.

His Own Account

Lewis did tell part of his story himself. Surprised by Joy, published in 1955 when he was fifty-six, is the account of his childhood, his schooling, his loss of faith and his long road back to it. It is a brilliant book, funny and sharp and searching, and it remains the indispensable source for his early life. But it is not a full autobiography, and it never claims to be. Lewis said plainly that he was telling the story of his conversion, and only those parts of his life that bore upon it. The book stops in 1931, more than thirty years before his death. It says very little about the war, almost nothing about the Moore household in which he lived for three decades, and nothing at all about his marriage, which had not yet happened.

It also has the weaknesses of all memory. Lewis wrote it in his fifties about events in his childhood and youth, and he wrote it with a purpose. Some of his judgements were sharpened by hindsight. His picture of his father is affectionate but also, many readers have felt, unfair. His account of his English schools is so bitter that his brother, who had attended one of them and liked it, thought it badly overdrawn. And at least one of his dates, the year he came to believe in God, appears to be wrong, as we shall see.

The Letters and the Diaries

Fortunately Lewis was one of the great letter-writers of his age, and an enormous number of his letters survive. They have been gathered and edited by Walter Hooper, a young American who became his secretary for a few weeks in 1963 and spent the rest of his long life serving his literary legacy. The Collected Letters fill three thick volumes, and they let us follow Lewis almost week by week from his schooldays to the end. His letters to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves, written over nearly fifty years, are especially revealing, because Greeves was the one person to whom he told almost everything.

His brother Warren kept a diary for most of his adult life. A selection was published in 1982 under the title Brothers and Friends, and Warren also wrote a short memoir of his brother which was printed with the first collection of Lewis’s letters in 1966. Warren’s testimony is precious, because he knew Jack better and longer than anyone. But it has its own colouring. He loved his brother fiercely, he disliked Mrs Moore intensely, and in his later years he wrote some things in bitterness that he might have softened in health.

There are also the memories of friends, pupils and colleagues, recorded in books and interviews over many decades, and the published letters and diaries of others in his circle, especially Tolkien. And there are the records kept by colleges, regiments, hospitals and registry offices, which can sometimes settle a question that memory leaves open.

The Biographers

The first full biography was written by two of his friends, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, and published in 1974. It is warm, detailed and close to its subject. George Sayer, a former pupil who became a close friend, published Jack in 1988, a book many readers still think the best portrait of the man. A. N. Wilson’s biography of 1990 was livelier and more sceptical, and it provoked argument for some of its claims. Alan Jacobs wrote a fine study of Lewis’s imagination, The Narnian, in 2005. In 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Lewis’s death, Alister McGrath published a biography that went back to the letters and re-examined the chronology, and it changed some long-accepted dates. Philip and Carol Zaleski’s The Fellowship of 2015 set Lewis among the other Inklings. Abigail Santamaria’s life of Joy Davidman, also of 2015, told the marriage from Joy’s side. This book has drawn on all of them, and its debts are listed in the last appendix.

Where the Sources Disagree

On most of the facts of Lewis’s life the sources agree. On a few they do not, and it is better to name them at the start.

The first is the date of his conversion to belief in God. Lewis placed it in the summer term of 1929. McGrath, reading the letters closely, has argued that it must have been the summer of 1930, and most scholars now accept his case, though not all. This book gives both dates and explains the reasoning in its place.

The second is the nature of Lewis’s relationship with Janie Moore, the mother of his dead friend, with whom he lived from 1919 until her death in 1951. Some biographers believe that in its early years it was a love affair. Others believe it was always the relationship of a young man to a woman who had become a second mother to him. Lewis never explained it, and the evidence is incomplete. This book sets out what is known and what is guessed, and does not pretend to settle what cannot be settled.

The third is a cluster of smaller matters: the exact date of the famous ride to Whipsnade Zoo, the story of his supposed humiliation at the hands of the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, and several details of his marriage that later films and plays have rearranged for dramatic effect. Each is dealt with where it falls.

The Legends

Some stories about Lewis are simply false, and it does no honour to him to repeat them. He did not lose his faith in reason after a debate in 1948. He did not abandon his Christian writing in old age. The film Shadowlands, which many people know better than any book, changed the ages of Joy’s sons, left one of them out entirely, and invented scenes and words that never happened, as films do. And a great many sayings attributed to Lewis on the internet are not his at all. This book quotes him only three times, each time from a published book and with the source given. Everything else is told in its own words.

What Kind of Book This Is

This is a Christian biography. It does not pretend to be neutral about the faith Lewis came to hold, but it does try to be fair to the man, including his faults. Lewis had no patience with a cult of personality, and he disliked fuss about himself above almost anything. The truth about a sinner whom God was mending is more use to other sinners than a legend about a saint, and it gives the glory where it belongs. He would want his life told straight. That is what the following chapters attempt.